Green Room

Obama 2010: Pitchforks and Arugula

Since his party lost the special election to fill Ted Kennedy’s Massachusetts Senate seat, pundits have been proclaiming President Barack Obama in need of a new message. As this week drew to a close, he offered some samples of what it will sound like.

Turning up the volume on the fiery populist rhetoric he’s been deploying against the Wall Street “fat cats” that have become a favorite target, Obama signaled that he intends to pursue new Wall Street regulations as well as health care reform, despite his party having lost its 60-seat supermajority in the Senate.

The administration’s bank policies have been a political stumbling block, perhaps as much as health care, according to polls: National Journal polling has found that 76 percent see the administration’s response to the financial crisis as benefiting (separate categories lumped together here) banks, investment companies, major corporations, and wealthy individuals. AFL-CIO-sponsored polling by Hart Research found that, in Massachusetts, 61 percent said recession policies have helped large banks a lot or a fair amount, vs. 18 percent who said the same of working people.

In The Audacity of Hope, Obama wrote that he served as a “blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.” After a year in the Oval Office, the screen is no longer blank. Selling Obama as a populist may prove to be tough sledding.

Blowback

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No one is going to be able to get around zero to help the economy if he doesn’t want it helped. There has to be a 3 point shot from somewhere that will get businesses back into business. You can only hunker down for so long before making a move. Wall Street was starting to make a comeback before zero opened his mouth. Seems like he wants to put a lid on them for awhile longer.

Obama continues to paint himself into a corner. His options shrink. One problem is that he’s lied so many times about so many things — not least of all about his own persona — that any reinvention of himself is hobbled from the start. His townhall meetings are now just weird — filled with incoherent populism, self-conscious outbursts of defiance, rather revealing denials of Narcissism, and generally choppy and maladroit rhetoric. He shows no signs of humility, educability or genuine concern for the mood of the country or people he’s supposed to be leading.

The anti-health-insurance-industry, anti-special-interest-power rhetoric has been a staple of Obama speeches since early summer, as he has used that language to press for health reform. But in his speech on Friday, anti-Washington-ism and standing up for the little guy was showcased more prominently as a frame for his entire presidency.

An elitist, arrogant, snob…was, is, will be a SNOB.

The U.S. Americans are pretty naive, but they’re not that dumb, Pinocchio in Chief.

Yes, but also for the Dems facing election next year. Unlike those who believe the Blue Dogs and others would take a personal hit to support the leftist dream of universal health care, I’d bet on the survival instinct. The Won is running out of places to hide.

I will bet that it’s actually nothing but “The State of Obama” address, that he will spin, spin, spin, shake his fist, say “let me be perfectly clear” a half-dozen times and then scamper off stage to the scattered applause of the duller of the MSM sycophants and a handful of “last-ditchers” who are so wedded to this imbecile that they have no other options.

Watch. He’s so much smarter than all of us. There’s nothing to improve!

Breaking News: The 2010 SOTU speech in accordance with a fictitious parliamentary procedure has been postponed indefinitely because the presenter is in such trouble right now that he can’t think of a way to bullshjt his way out of this quagmire.

Of course Obama’s anticorporate populism is a smokescreen… he is a progressive!

I sometimes read the leftist/progressive/liberal websites, just to see what the other side is thinking. Lately, they seem to be thinking Obama is secretly right wing, mainly because of Obama’s supposed “pandering” to corporations. Such opinions are sad because they betray a complete lack of understanding of leftism’s/progressivism’s development and history.

Two widespread, yet false, assumptions underlie their anger:
1. Corporations are inherently rightwing/conservative…
2. Libs/progs and corporations are natural enemies…
Neither of these assumptions hold up to even the barest of historical reviews.

The belief that progressives and corporations are always at war is a post-60′s artifact. Before then, every form of progressivism (except full-blown Marxism) was a variation of Corporate Statism. From Social Democracy to Fascism to the New Deal, all of the wealth redistributing do-gooders of the past relied on corporate-government-labor partnerships to efficiently run a nation’s economy for the benefit of the many. No form of progressivism (except, again, full-blown Marxism) wanted the headache of day-to-day running of business — they preferred to leave the dirty work to others… the so-called “good corporate citizens” who would knuckle under to the wishes of their distant government masters.

So, to any progressives who may read this: Obama hasn’t betrayed your movement… he sits squarely in its historical mainstream. It is you who are out of step. Progressivism is the rule by big corporations and big labor, working in harmony under big government, in order to maximize and distribute a nation’s wealth. To be an anticorporate progressive is an oxymoron and quite ahistorical… and the primacy of the individual was seen as a major roadblock on the way to man’s “bright future”.

Excellent points. I would add, as historian Burton Folsom has described, corporations can be divided into political entrepreneurial and market entrepreneurial. James Hill’s Great Northern Railroad got big without a dime of government subsidy, land grant, or line of credit.